Oh boy. I decided to give the AssBlaster a ragdoll while I was at it, and ran into the problem of the left legs apparently having problems for being mirrored from the right legs. That ended up screwing up the left leg, so I just re-made the legs, aligned them to the old ones, deleted the originals, re-named the new ones to the original bone names, linked them all together, then re-applied the skin, which can thankfully be stored to file and recalled.

...and then the in-game ragdoll ended up being a lot smaller than the shrieker XD

Yeah, I ended up using an older scene file which I hadn't resized yet. But no matter, all the file names are the same, so the qc and ragdoll will be unaffected.

Well, I think you guys should know that I fixed the AssBlaster size issue, but I haven't gotten a whole lot more done aside from baking some fake ambient occlusion into the Graboid and Shriekers' textures. Nothing to sneeze at, but it's no new texture for the AB yet.

This puppy renders like nothing I've ever seen, simulates with crazy ease, and can do Crysis at ALL highest possible settings set to maximum value and run as smoothly as a modern computer playing the original Half Life. Like floating over glass. No slowdowns, no hesitations. Fucking made of awesome. And all while keeping temps below 60C under load, and around 25C (room temperature) while idle. God I love that Zalman cooler. It gets loud if I set it to full, but it's adjustable, and it dissipates heat like a dream. Probably didn't hurt that I used ArcticSilver as my thermal-grease either.

Only hitch in this little dream is that Windows 7 seems to have taken the belief that the new motherboard, processor and RAM suggests it's in an entirely new computer. Not really true, same case, but it still made me re-activate Windows and while my Adobe stuff still works, my Autodesk programs lost or corrupted their licenses. Max 2009 wants activation, but runs like a trial. Maya 2010 seems to have found or generated it's license again, so it works now. Max 2011 was tougher, and I found out I needed to delete some data file so it would generate it again and finally work.

Most of may pay-for plugins for Max don't want to work for similar reasons, but some do, and I can reinstall the others simply enough.

Well, I think you guys should know that I fixed the AssBlaster size issue, but I haven't gotten a whole lot more done aside from baking some fake ambient occlusion into the Graboid and Shriekers' textures. Nothing to sneeze at, but it's no new texture for the AB yet.

This puppy renders like nothing I've ever seen, simulates with crazy ease, and can do Crysis at ALL highest possible settings set to maximum value and run as smoothly as a modern computer playing the original Half Life. Like floating over glass. No slowdowns, no hesitations. Fucking made of awesome. And all while keeping temps below 60C under load, and around 25C (room temperature) while idle. God I love that Zalman cooler. It gets loud if I set it to full, but it's adjustable, and it dissipates heat like a dream. Probably didn't hurt that I used ArcticSilver as my thermal-grease either.

Only hitch in this little dream is that Windows 7 seems to have taken the belief that the new motherboard, processor and RAM suggests it's in an entirely new computer. Not really true, same case, but it still made me re-activate Windows and while my Adobe stuff still works, my Autodesk programs lost or corrupted their licenses. Max 2009 wants activation, but runs like a trial. Maya 2010 seems to have found or generated it's license again, so it works now. Max 2011 was tougher, and I found out I needed to delete some data file so it would generate it again and finally work.

Most of may pay-for plugins for Max don't want to work for similar reasons, but some do, and I can reinstall the others simply enough.

In any case, I can still work, so fear not!

i have a question but i know it will sound dumb but . How will the graboid npc work out thats the one im most interested about ?

like how they will notice your on the ground and how they will attack and come up out of the ground and how they travel underground ?

The miracles of Lua, trust me, silverlan (who is in charge of the coding) can do some pretty fucking awesome shit with it.

Well yes, Silverlan will be invaluable, certainly. But getting them to move underground is only a matter of having the animations take place beneath the 0 Z value of the grid. Since NPC movement is gauged by the directional motion of a character in it's animation in relation to it's place on the 3D-grid, the npc should respond accordingly when placed higher or lower on a grid during an animation.

Who know this works for sure in Source because of the burrowing behavior of npc's like the headcrab, antlion and antlion guardian, which burrow in and out according to these principles.

The only issue I foresee is I'm not sure how collisions work here. I want the Graboid to interact with stationary and mobile props, but I don't know how to do that and have the world brushes ignore the collision. After all, we want to be able to shoot it, and we want to not walk through it when it's above ground.

I have a feeling Silverlan's input will be most important in this regard.

Did'nt read every post (33 pages to read) so i'm not sure if it has been suggested yet or if the process on this has already been completed. Here goes :P

My idea is that the AssBlaster could be based on the Antlion animations (modified heavily of course). The jumpin animation would be perfect for it, but the walking, running, attacking etc - Would have to be completely revamped, but i'm guessing the antiol would have a good script and jumping animation (slightly modified) for the AssBlaster :D

Hey now, there's no need for that. It's partly my fault for not keeping the OP a central quick-news page.

But yes, given the models use their own skeletons out of necessity, they require their own custom animation set, which I'm quite capable of producing.

Sorry for the lack of updates the past few days folks; I decided I'd finally finish Earthbound, a game I abandoned a long time ago after a certain point. I'm nearly done, and I'll get straight to work on texturing the Ass-Blaster, so maybe, just maybe, we can add yet another ragdoll to the public domain soon :)

Well, I WAS planning to go to bed, given it's 4:30 in the morning, but I'm WAY too pissed off to sleep without letting out my frustration first.

Firstly, my AssBlaster model is a piece of shit.

It's really inexcusable. Given how nicely the Shrieker came out, I'm baffled at how many things I did wrong given I made this soon after.

Of course, I know I stopped refining the AB further because I was getting scared of the poly-count, owing to just how much detail went into those Goddamn wings. The wings themselves don't connect to the body properly, the legs and body have corners that reveal an awkward lack of detail, the jaws have MAJOR low-poly mistakes that make it look simply horrendous to me, and the legs are attached in a way that causing horrible-horrible stretching to the mesh and the UV's whenever the legs move.

So, I went into Maya to fix the UV's.

This of course, took hours, though I was reasonably satisfied with the improvements. However, to do the UV's properly, I had to fix certain vertices that had failed to connect among other things. And so I exported back to Max.

So, secondly, Max's UV-mapping system is ALSO a worthless piece of shit.

Transferring UV's from an identical model is generally surefire, but in Max, if you altered your mesh in ANY fucking way, the entire thing goes fucking crazy, because Max doesn't see UV's in a per-face manner, which is completely stupid.

So, since I'm not satisfied, and WON'T be as long as this is the case, I'm afraid I'm going to go the whole hog and fix the model in Maya, bedamned the poly count and re-rig it to the existing bones in Max when I've finished. Given how simplistic the AB-skeleton is, this won't be hard. This does however mean an additional delay as I make the model to my standards, since I'm not leaving it as it is, and I'll never be able to take my mind off it if I do. That's just how I roll.

Alrighty, a bit of work, but I'm mainly satisfied with what I've fixed.

No real added details, per se, but the resolution of the mesh itself is significantly improved. Blockiness in the geometry has been all but eliminated, save in places that nobody is really going to be looking anyway.

The biggest improvement is in the legs, which were granted both higher resolution and a few improvised edge-loops that, upon re-rigging, granted the legs far more seamless motion. So basically, it now looks NATURAL when the thigh rotates along the body. When I see it, I don't feel like I want to hide something.

But the best thing, I think, is the re-done UVW mapping. Max has the capacity to use pelt maps and things, but in Max, you could only ever map after your model was entirely finished. Maya allowed me to do my mapping when half the model was deleted, to be mirrored-in and welded later. This means I only map one side of the model, and when I mirror that side, that new side has the same UVW coordinates, saving on TPage space and ensuring the coordinates match for a single texture. But Maya also has the advantage of being able to "smooth" UV coordinates, by flattening them after-the-fact, ensuring the ENTIRE surface area of a UV shell gets evenly covered by the texture. No stretching, no weird crap. And thus, texturing will be far simpler and more effective...

So then, on to texturing...whee...!

Edited:

I should also note that the new version currently functions in-game just fine.

emm hi everyone
im new here, and i havent found any explanation.
first of all, this looks REALLY badass.
so what is this? you talk about models, but what are models?
is this NPCs? or is this something you can use as ragdoll[ actually move it and pose it], or just like any other prop that you can only place and rotate?
if its a ragdoll, where is the download? or maybe its not done yet.
ill be happy if you could answer this, cus like i said, im new here.

emm hi everyone
im new here, and i havent found any explanation.
first of all, this looks REALLY badass.
so what is this? you talk about models, but what are models?
is this NPCs? or is this something you can use as ragdoll[ actually move it and pose it], or just like any other prop that you can only place and rotate?
if its a ragdoll, where is the download? or maybe its not done yet.
ill be happy if you could answer this, cus like i said, im new here.

thx

Both, actually.

These are intended for use as snpc's, but AS snpc's they have a working ragdoll.

The Shrieker is already animated and usable as an snpc if given proper coding. Silverlan has the final say in that.

As of now, two beta ragdolls are available for public use: the Graboid and the Shrieker.

Is it really worth my time, busting my ass to get this stuff out for your benefit, if I'm not even going to be acknowledged after two or three days?

Do you know what it feels like to get something out that you're proud of at four in the morning, wake up and dash to your computer to see what people thought, only for there to be NOTHING there? Do you know how disheartening that is? It's like waking up on Christmas morning only to realize your calender had been off, and it's actually the 23rd.

I don't even expect praise, only acknowledgment that people are aware of what I'm doing. Say it's good, say it sucks, say you love Tremors or say you don't. Just don't let me feel like I'm speaking to a fucking doorknob.

And this seems to follow me wherever I go. Nobody cares.

I post a question about modeling on CG-Talk, and for four hours I'm entirely ignored.

I post this awesome animated Earthbound series in the FP video section, and I get one dumbass asking me where the villain-who-doesn't-show-up-till-the-end is in the fucking pilot episode, followed by an empty, uncaring void of silence.

So tell me guys, do you actually care? Does it matter whether or not these snpc's are made, or should I forget it and seek-out other prospects? Because I'm not dedicating hours of hard work for the sake of it.

I apologize that I have yet to comment on the successful release of the Ass Blaster, and there's really no excuse for me, so sorry for that.

The AB does look great, and I'm not saying that because I wanna kiss your ass to make up for my unwarranted apathy, I'm saying that because it genuinely looks well done. One critique would be that it seemingly looks a tad slim, but I am recollecting that observation from memory only and haven't even checked for reference properly yet so bluh bluh.

You're doing good pal, and I have no doubt that people are enjoying your work even if they aren't openly exclaiming such.

Well, I gathered sounds for the Graboid and am saving and sorting the raw captures accordingly. I've also worked a little on controls for the animation of the Graboid. I can't seem to find a way of IK-ing the tongues or body in a way that behaves the way I want, so I'm going to have to animate all that manually, which isn't ideal, but is far from impossible.

One great thing I discovered was that Source DOES indeed accept animation of a bone's size. This has worried me for a while, but I did a test animation of the tongues all shrinking long-ways and exported it as an SMD. The re-import to a clean Max file contained the animation of the bones squashing, so I know I can shrink the tongues to hide them in the stomach rather than the alternative of coiling them up in a bundle, which would be a pain.

Testing the tongues however, led me to realize I had underdone their geometric resolution on a function level. Basically, they bend too much and they bend shut, or at least appear really blocky.

Thankfully, while this required me to re-rig the tongues, it was a very simple process, and because Max's skin system behaves on a per-element level, these actions did NOT affect the rest of the Graboid model. Happy times : )

But yes, now I'm naming a bunch of captured Graboid sounds so I can eventually animate them for real. You can load sounds into 3D programs to have something to animate to, for timing. Yeah, lots of red-tape to get this sorta' stuff done.

Good thing is, now that I really think about it, the Graboid's animations should be EASY given how little you ever really see of it.

So, it's about that time again. I've done all the sounds I could find.

The only worthwhile sounds came from the first two films. Tremors 3 and 4 either have really generic sounds or ones that just don't mesh with the abundant clips from the original.

So I'm at the point where I can begin animating, and I have a good idea of what I'm doing, but I need a list. I'll put up whatever I can think of, and I'll amend it as I go, but if you guys have anything I've yet to add (and a description of what it pertains to) it'd be nice.

Creep: when not hunting, or when sneaking up on an unaware/slow enemy

run: for actively chasing prey; accompanied by dust-plumes from surfacing for air

run_breach: randomly between run cycles, will breach the surface momentarily

run_fear: fleeing from a painful noise like a nearby explosion; kicks up topsoil; VERY fast, but cannot attack

fall: if fleeing off a near-vertical surface (cliff), will plummet in an arc and splatter upon the floor.

surface_intro: Upon spawn or maturation from Grablet, will breach the surface vertically (like first full Graboid sighting in Tremors 1)

surface_tongueretract: if the Graboid succeeds upon latching onto an npc or small physics object, it's tongues will steadily retract into it's maw, where it will then submerge to swallow it's victim whole.

surface_tonguedamage: if in defense the Graboid's tongues are injured, they will retract, and Graboid will re-assess strategy

surface_extend: if targets miss, but are still within a certain range, Graboid will pull itself further out of the ground to reach them

surface_submerge: if targets miss, and are outside a certain range, Graboid will submerge below ground in pursuit

surface_extent_attack: if extend places Graboid within potential reach of foes, it will press it's tongue-attack on

surface_extend_submerge: if extend results merely in foes being outside a certain range, Graboid will submerge again in pursuit

surface_extend_tongueretract: if the Graboid succeeds upon latching onto an npc or small physics object, it's tongues will steadily retract into it's maw, where it will then submerge to swallow it's victim whole.

surface_extend_tonguedamage: if in defense the Graboid's tongues are injured, they will retract, and Graboid will re-assess strategy

surface_die: if aggressors fatally wound the Gaboid on the surface, it will writhe, collapse and die of it's injuries

surface_extend_die: if aggressors fatally wound the Gaboid on the surface, it will writhe, collapse and die of it's injuries

surface_hesitate: if Graboid is significantly wounded in one blow, it MIGHT recoil ,close it's maw and hesitate a moment. Will only occur again after a set amount of time.

surface_extend_hesitate: if Graboid is significantly wounded in one blow, it MIGHT recoil ,close it's maw and hesitate a moment. Will only occur again after a set amount of time.

surface_painedthrash: if Graboid is mortally wounded (one non-explosive hit takes more than half it's health) it will stop it's attack and swing it's head about wildly in furious agony. Can damage and throw objects and npcs.

surface_extend_painedthrash: if Graboid is mortally wounded (one non-explosive hit takes more than half it's health) it will stop it's attack and swing it's head about, smashing things wildly in furious agony. Can damage and throw objects and npcs.

slurp_underground: if Graboid reaches directly below a noisy-object or npc, while running or stopped, the Graboid will open it's jaws just underground and suck it's victim below without exposing itself.

slurp_launch: if Graboid reaches directly below a noisy-object or npc, while running or stopped, the Graboid will launch out of the ground vertically to catch it's victim in it's jaws and take it under.

eject: if Graboid swallows an inedible object or explosive (before explosive detonates) it will launch the object vertically back out with significant force.

beach: if Graboid has existed long enough, it will beach it's body above-ground

Damn dude you made a shitton of animations good job. Sorry I haven't been following the thread to closely as I used to it's mainly because of school and laziness have kept me from taking the time to say something useful.

Edit:
Oh thats your list of animations that you are going to do, my bad read that post wrong. Still though good work I'm glad this project is going somewhere.

God these npc's are going to kick SO MUCH ASS.
I'll have drink 18 gallons of POWER THIRST in one sitting, then fire 17 LAZORS at my monitor then go and get myself hit by A10 Worthog. Not even DR.TRAN who has a PHD in KICKING YOUR ASS can handle this pure epicness!! GAAHH!! *heavy grunting and explosions of testostrone*

Well, I made a dent. Mostly the more brainless tasks, but it broke the animation ice and has given me some momentum. If only my damn English class wasn't so demanding I'd press on quite a bit more tonight.

I am really amazed by the work going into this project. It's been a long while since the start of this thing and J-Dude has kept at it (with other people contributing along the way). non-Half-Life NPCs (and ones which are not new models stuck onto an existing NPC) are in my opinion the coolest things you can get for Garry's Mod, and there aren't many of them. To get more in the form of the monsters from Tremors would be pretty great (massive understatement).

Well, I made a dent. Mostly the more brainless tasks, but it broke the animation ice and has given me some momentum. If only my damn English class wasn't so demanding I'd press on quite a bit more tonight.